Item #  Description              Size              Color       Qty  Price
------  -----------------------  ----------------  ----------  ---  ---------
231642  Cardigan                 Misses L          PERIWINKLE   1 @ $14.49  Each
231642  Cardigan                 Misses L          PALM LEAF    1 @ $14.49  Each

So, I don’t celebrate Women’s Equality Day today, because contrary to popular mainstream American opinion, Women includes all American women, not just White ladies.

. . . "Oh, why don't you--why don't you shut up?"  I think I've had that said to me more than anything else over the years when I was younger.  "You talk too much."  You know?  "Don't rock the boat."  Even though they're miserable--people are miserable--they'll tell you this.  But you're not supposed to say anything about it.

So when I discovered that there was the world of the artist, it saved my life, because I could strive to be individual and as best as I could be.  I didn't have to have money.   I didn't have to have anything except my life.

And I went for that.  And I'm glad I did.

Still, if Tom Wolfe had written "The Recessionistas," he would have noted the brands of shoes, the Birkin bags and the personal trainers. And he would have been praised for his attention to detail. . . .

But my concern is larger, for the issue is insidious: the way Chick Lit has been used to denigrate a wide swath of novels about contemporary life that happen to be written by women.

If you think it's not affecting our work, not affecting what the publishers are handed, not affecting the legacy we leave for future generations, you're wrong.

 . . . I have also begun to believe that the writer who continues to write, and to write well, to write deeply, often finds that she quietly, year by year, constructs a system of values that is by nature resistant. It’s not that one sets out to do this, exactly; but it happens, it accretes, as the choices the world offers inevitably arise. It may begin as an uncomfortable awareness, a prickling, even a sinking feeling. But you know it. You see the deal. You hesitate, almost wishing you didn’t know what you know, which is something along these lines: You cannot continue to write well if you believe that money is the measure of a person’s worth. You cannot continue to write well if you believe that critical consensus is the measure of an artist’s worth. You cannot continue to write well if you are protecting your family, your children, your community, or your social position. You cannot continue to write well if you don’t believe in the value of art as such—as itself—not in the service of some greater cause or system or set of beliefs, whether those beliefs fall to the right or the left or rise to the more spiritual realms above. You can write well without money, without praise, without social or political approval—you might not be that happy or look that great, but you can do it—but if your writing is essentially obedient to any of these powerful forces, its light will slowly flicker and then go out.

Just North of Nowhere

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy on me.
--Franz Wright

Often the changes one yearns for,
one has to suffer.  Unless,
waiting near the undershade, the elderberry,
the aster, etc.,
     the world is close to blooming,
heart-drawn in minor notes, tuned to the open sun.

Then, how simple to assemble it all (the breaks
in the human vessel).

Like a boy gripping rain on white branches,
you will build

                     a reliquary in your chest.
Fill it with two watts of light.

Once filled, the moon will exit like a lullaby
          from your humming rib cage's hollow.
There you will find a heart,
& waiting nightly you will sing it to sleep.

I was a favorite niece, the only daughter
and no virgin:  the valley grew too small.
So I pawned my first flute and typewriter
and headed for a place that had it all--
classy subtitled films, canyon-laced coast,
flamed leaves to the east and desert beyond. . . .

Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.

Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.

During and after the chaos of Katrina, over a thousand released sex offenders (required by Megan's Law to register their whereabouts with law enforcement) went off the grid.  Nola Céspedes*, a mouthy young cubana cub reporter for the Times-Picayune who grew up in the Desire Projects of New Orleans, gets assigned a feature story she doesn't want:  to explore the human realities behind the statistics on child molesters' rates of recidivism, their rehabilitation, their reception back into the community--just as a seven-year-old girl disappears from the French Quarter.

And then things get personal.

If roughly one out of nine Americans is gay, why shouldn’t one out of nine Supreme Court justices be?

Q:  Your former boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel is barely mentioned.  Why did you refrain from spilling your secrets?

SS:  I guess mostly because I'm not a desperate douchey scumbag.